


Varied Degrees of Success

by Lauren (notalwaysweak)



Category: We're Alive: Frontier (Web Series)
Genre: Additional Warnings Apply, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Graphic Depiction of Field Medicine, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2020-11-28 07:42:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20962940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notalwaysweak/pseuds/Lauren
Summary: In which field surgery just might work.Spoilers for 1x03-1x04.





	1. Divergence (Eureka)

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't yet watched through to, say, 1x05 of _We're Alive: Frontier_, I cannot stress enough how much of a potential spoiler this fic is to the logically minded.
> 
> Brief bit of backstory preceding this: Bandaid and Asher have embarked on... well, it's complicated, but there's been smooching and rather more emotional entanglement than is perhaps sensible in a war zone. Or, "You're cute and we could all die at any second."
> 
> * * *

In a few short days Bandaid had heard Asher make a number of diverse sounds, but nothing, _nothing_ chilled him to the bone like the shriek of pain he heard now. Asher sounded like an animal with its leg caught in a trap, and Bandaid was terribly afraid that was exactly the case.

He tried to get by Rai to see what was going on, but she delivered a brisk chop to his thigh with the side of her palm that dissuaded him. “No,” she said flatly. “Is Jenny driving?”

“Uh, yeah.” How else would the rail driver still have forward momentum? Bandaid was assuming it was moving, anyway, because everything else had stopped for him at that sound of pain.

“Then you need to be up in the crow’s nest in case any more of those shits are still hanging on.”

“I’m the medic, I—”

“Go,” Wraith broke in. “Bandaid, _go_. You don’t want to be here for this.”

“I _need_ to be here for this,” Bandaid said fiercely.

“No. You don’t.” Rai smacked his thigh again. “Go upstairs. We’ll call you when it’s over, one way or another.”

Hot tears swam in Bandaid’s eyes, but he could still see the amount of blood that his heart told him meant there was only _one_ way, one outcome, no _another way_ possible.

“Go upstairs, B,” Asher echoed, voice weak. “Please.”

Bandaid dragged himself up the ladder, dashing tears from his eyes, and drew his pistol once he was settled in the miniscule space that was the crow’s nest. It was dusty and smelled of the same sweat as everywhere else in the rail driver did, and he was sure he could smell the copper tang of blood from below. There wasn’t much between the crow’s nest and the sleeper car, only a roller door that in a pinch might keep the infected from using it as an access point, but Bandaid heard the squeak of metal and saw Wraith looking solemnly up at him before it closed.

* * *

“Are you sure you don’t want him with you?” Rai asked.

“Don’t want him to see me die,” Asher said, biting his lip against the pain.

“You’re not gonna die, jackass. Not if we have anything to say about it.” Amazingly, she grinned at him. “I do have to take your pants, though.”

“I thought that didn’t happen on your watch.”

Asher heard the clang of metal and then Wraith was beside him as well, a pair of sturdy shears in his hand.

“Explain it for him,” he said, beginning to snip the fabric up the right side of Asher’s pants.

“The wound you sustained is on your right leg. The infected blood is on your left leg, so it’s a hot zone.” Rai was pulling gloves on as fast as she could. “We cut your pants off, we lift them away on _this_ side so that the blood doesn’t spatter, and then we dump like a gallon of moonshine on your wound and hope nothing got contaminated.”

Asher looked down at his legs. There was a small line of blood on his outer right calf, welling up a little but not anything like as dire as he’d thought, although it wasn’t exactly superficial. His left leg was _soaked_ in blood that wasn’t his, and he instinctively shifted his right leg as far away as possible.

“Atta boy, spread ‘em wide.” Rai looked over at Wraith. “Do we have some plastic or something we can put over his right calf in case this goes everywhere?”

“What if it seals the infected blood in with his wound?” Wraith was already unfolding a small tarp before pushing Asher’s pant leg out of the way.

“If the blood’s already there, I’m already fucked,” Asher said. He steadfastly didn’t look toward the hatch, focusing on Rai’s face instead. “Do it.”

Wraith doubled the tarp around Asher’s calf. Rai took the shears in gloved hands and gingerly snipped the bloodied cloth away, peeling it from Asher’s skin. He could see how intent she was on the task and how her eyes darted over each bit of exposed skin, assessing it for abrasions or cuts. Whatever she saw—or didn’t see—must have been the right thing, because although her whole body was still tense, the hardness in her eyes faded.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Wraith, do we have a biohazard bucket?”

“We have a _laundry _bucket.”

“Not anymore we don’t.” Asher heard the slop of his pants and socks going into the bucket, then the thud of his boots. He was probably lucky that the blood hadn’t reached so far up his thigh that she’d had to take his briefs. “This is gonna sting, pretty boy.”

The splash of moonshine over his open wound didn’t just sting; it made him want to scream. Asher gritted his teeth and let out only a small gasp as Wraith wiped the blood on that side—_his_ blood—away, while Rai scrubbed off the _other_ blood.

“You should try staying that quiet every night,” Rai said, and Asher shot back, “Like you and Jenny can talk,” getting a deep chuckle from Wraith.

The silence became awkward only when the cleanup was done and Wraith had bandaged Asher’s calf. It was sloppy—Rai could have done better—but as she stripped off her bloodied gloves and added them to the newly repurposed biohazard bucket, Asher realized that she was genuinely scared of getting the infected blood on his wound.

That more than anything else gave him a spark of hope. Why would she be so concerned about contamination, unless she thought there was legitimately a chance that he’d remained uninfected?

“Now what?” he asked.

“Well, we don’t exactly have a quarantine bay...” Rai looked at Wraith and shrugged.

Wraith pulled the thin mattress off Asher’s bunk and moved it aside, but left him the blanket and pillow. “I am sorry,” he said, and he looked and sounded as though he meant it. “But, if anything happens—”

“My mattress is your mattress,” Asher said, curling up on his side. He was suddenly so _tired_, and he reeked of moonshine, and his pillow might have borne more resemblance to a coconut but right now it was so _comfortable_—

“No sleeping!” Rai snapped. “You stay awake for an hour. Bandaid will monitor your vitals. If you display any of the signs of infection...” Her voice softened a little. “We’ll take care of you.”

Wraith reached up and rattled the concertinaed hatchway open; Bandaid came down immediately, ignoring most of the ladder and landing with a loud thud. He looked at where Asher had been and then to Asher’s bunk, and the hope on his face was so terrible Asher could barely stand to look at him.

“We _still don’t know_,” Rai said, poking him in the chest with one small finger. “One hour. You know what signs to look for. And you know what to do.”

“One hour,” Bandaid repeated, already sinking to his knees beside Asher’s bunk. Rai wordlessly climbed the ladder, pulling the hatch shut behind her, while Wraith went up front to report to Jenny. The bucket of bloody clothing, covered over with a lid and weighed down with a chunk of wood, sat in the furthest corner possible, awaiting proper disposal when they next stopped.

If Asher started running a fever, sweating hard, slurring his words, or any one of a number of symptoms, that stop would be sooner rather than later.

Bandaid spent the first minute of sixty counting the beats of Asher’s heart. Asher lay still on his side, eyes open, quietly watching Bandaid’s face.

“Pulse is normal. Maybe a little elevated, but I can put that down to stress. Open your mouth.” Bandaid slipped a thermometer under Asher’s tongue. “Close your mouth.”

“Mph.”

“Thank you for your articulate and concise contribution to the discussion.” Bandaid laid his hand against Asher’s forehead, checking his temperature the old-fashioned way before the soft beep from the thermometer confirmed that everything was okay. He slipped the thermometer out from under Asher’s tongue. “Sorry, I don’t have any candy to reward you with like at the doctor’s office.”

He was close enough to hear perfectly clearly when Asher whispered, “You have a perfectly good lollipop in your pants.”

The laugh that burst out of Bandaid was tremendous. “Oh my god... you’re terrible,” he whispered back. “If Rai heard that she’s going to kill you anyway, just on principle.”

But that was too much too soon, and the shadows in Asher’s eyes were still too dark, and Bandaid wished he hadn’t said it. He clasped Asher’s hand and pressed a kiss to his forehead.

“Don’t... bodily fluids.”

“It’s not like your head’s bleeding. And besides, who just offered whom a blowjob?”

“Only because you don’t have candy.”

Asher was talking a lot of bullshit, but he wasn’t slurring his words; he just sounded... _happy_. He was curled up on a narrow bunk with only a thin blanket, and his leg was wounded, and he had to be hurting (but no painkillers until the hour was up; why waste them on a potentially dead man?), but he sounded happy.

“How’re you feeling?” Bandaid asked.

“Good. I hurt, but that’s good, right?”

One of the symptoms was numbness to pain. “Yeah, it sure is.”

Ultimately it was just too hard to talk. Instead they both watched the clock on the wall, intended for shift changes and an indication of the time for when the engine and thus the instruments panel was shut down, right now counting off the minutes. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. Bandaid checked Asher’s pulse and temperature again, this time with his lips pressed to Asher’s wrist. It was unorthodox and he couldn’t tell what was his heartbeat and what was Asher’s. Forty. Forty-five. Fifty. Rai poked her head down quietly and Bandaid gave her a tentative thumbs up. Fifty-five. Why was time moving so slowly? It was too slow.

At the fifty-nine minute mark Bandaid decided _fuck it_ and looked down into Asher’s eyes; Asher was already reaching for him and they met in the middle, kissing desperately, hoping like hell that the others would give them a moment, just one moment. They’d had time; now they needed _time_.

“Bandaid...” Asher’s voice dropped all the way to the lowest murmur. “Benjamin. Thank you.”

“I—”

Before he could say anything _too_ rash, Asher squeezed his hands hard, and Bandaid realized how pale Asher had gone. For a second panic took him, but then Asher was saying, “It’s all right, I’m all right, but if you don’t find me some painkillers _right now_ you’re in _so_ much trouble.”

Bandaid rose with alacrity, almost whacked his head on the bunk, and couldn’t stop smiling as he hunted out what he needed. Then it was a matter of getting Asher back up again so Wraith could put his mattress back. And _then_—

“No, don’t lie back down yet.” Bandaid pulled his own thin mattress off the top bunk and laid it down over Asher’s before spreading and tucking his blanket over them both, then ushering Asher into the now slightly less shitty bed. Their two pillows stacked together almost made one real pillow.

“And I thought lesbians were the ones who were meant to move in together on day three,” Rai said, hanging off the ladder, smirking at them.

“I guess that makes me a big ol’ lesbian then,” Bandaid said, snuggling in face to face with Asher, who blinked at him sleepily, the painkillers already taking effect. “Wake us if the world ends again.”


	2. Advancement (New Haven)

New Haven gave them—well. Not the warmest of welcomes; Marian clearly wasn’t keen on Asher or the UA, which put Bandaid on the defensive as well, and then conversing about what the travelers could do for the town only increased the tension. The not at all veiled implication that they’d been mistreating Sara wasn’t the icing on the cake, but it was close, and it was easier then for the group to separate for a while to try to acquaint themselves with the locals than to huddle in the rail driver any longer.

Asher slipped off somewhere on his own while Bandaid made his way to the docks, the vague idea in his head that he could fish there. When he got down there, though, the realization that night was coming set in, and thus the plan to barter for food was born.

He wasn’t entirely surprised when Jenny joined him, or when she gave him a knowing wink that had nothing to do with the fish or the gambling. He also wasn’t surprised when she proceeded to utterly thrash Jimmy at Liar’s Dice quicker than he could have gotten through the first couple of rounds. She was good at picking up on people’s tells.

Not that she needed any tells when, as they walked back toward the rail driver together, she tucked her arm through his and said, “So, you’re fucking in my rail driver?”

Bandaid managed not to swallow his tongue. “I believe the rail driver is the property of Stern Industries.”

“Bullshit. Look... you know I don’t care, _we_ don’t care about the gay part, that would be total hypocrisy. But Rai already talked to you, so I guess it’s my turn, and I just don’t want to see you lose your head over some wet behind the ears kid fresh out of military school, or whatever the fuck it is he was doing before this.”

“Hey, I don’t give you shit about your age difference from Rai,” Bandaid countered.

“Rai and I _know_ each other. You met Asher all of five days ago and every time you look at him you’ve got hearts in your eyes.”

“Do you really think I’m that far gone?”

“You’re besotted. A smitten kitten.”

“Oh, God.” Bandaid groaned and almost facepalmed before realizing that to do so would mean smacking himself in the face with the catfish. “No. Jenny, no. It’s just sex, he’s cute, he’s learning to give head—”

“—TMI—”

“—and he’s, I don’t know, I think the sex stuff is loosening him up. Not literally,” he was quick to add. “But he’s less of a jackass.”

“He probably couldn’t be _more_ of a jackass.” Jenny squinted at the rail driver. “Speaking of jackasses, what the fuck is Wraith doing?”

Bandaid looked at the line of safety candles. Fine. The camp stove. Also fine. The arch made of brittle dead branches, strands of ivy, and black paracord was less fine, and Wraith standing beneath it with a bowl of some dark liquid in his hand was absolutely not fine.

Dusk drawing in had called them all back to the rail driver at about the same time as one another, and Bandaid caught Asher’s eye, raising an eyebrow, wondering if he’d tell Wraith to stand down from this—whatever this was.

But Asher didn’t. He was leaning on a proper aluminum crutch, not just the shitty folding walking stick that was all that the rail driver had had in it, and he looked at Wraith as though everything Wraith was saying about performing a ritual together made perfect sense.

“I don’t care if we’ve got to swing a dead chicken over our heads and throw a pumpkin in the river,” Rai said, and that seemed to decide it; she moved to stand by Wraith as he chanted and Bandaid awkwardly put the fish down on the camp stove. The smell of it cooking wafted into the night air along with Wraith’s words, and the little tableau as everyone moved into a circle started to seem less nonsensical, although still bizarre.

“We need to share our tales with one another,” Wraith said, setting the bowl of what he’d confirmed was animal blood aside, much to Bandaid’s relief. Sharing tales was infinitely preferable to drinking blood. “We need to tell a secret we’ve never told anyone.”

_Is this just his way of getting some shit off his chest?_ Bandaid wondered, but then Rai lifted her gaze from the hissing ring of flame on the stove and spoke.

“I wasn’t always a sharpshooter.”

In the low light, Asher looked at her as she spoke, and wondered if the career she’d left behind was _mother_. She’d mentioned to him in passing—and he wondered if he was even supposed to have heard it, or if she’d thought him to be asleep—that had her son survived the outbreak they’d be the same age.

Kent spoke next, and his pride in the group made Bandaid’s hackles go up a little—but not at Kent. If he could feel such pride for them that he was willing to live and die alongside them after all of two days, then why couldn’t Bandaid feel that intensely—why couldn’t _he_ lose his head a little over Asher after _five_ days?

He couldn’t be frustrated at Jenny for long, though. Not when she said, looking uncomfortable, “I’m deaf in my left ear. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s why Rai always stands on your right,” Asher said softly.

“Damn right it is,” Rai said.

They were looking at Bandaid now, and he couldn’t. He couldn’t give them anything, not his name, not his former profession, not a word about the incipient feelings that everyone seemed to be seeing anyway. So he blurted out something about video games, and then felt like an asshole, not least because Rai promptly called him one.

It didn’t help that Wraith solemnly said that he too missed video games, and then followed that up with, “I let my brother die.”

Perhaps Bandaid should have given up his real name. Something real, anyway. Not something bullshit. Not in the face of Wraith saying that.

Asher was last, and he’d been chewing on his lower lip the whole time. They were all older than him. They all had _meaningful_ secrets. Even Bandaid’s irreverent contribution was just a reminder that he’d been alive _before_. Asher had never played a video game in his life. Not that that was a secret worth sharing. He’d used video simulations of combat scenarios, of course, and he understood that in days long past people had played video games that simulated war for fun. He didn’t really comprehend that part though; there was nothing fun about war.

“This is the first time I’ve had anything even vaguely resembling friends,” he found himself saying.

Rai’s eyebrow flickered. “You’re counting _us _as friends, kid?”

“I haven’t had anything I could use as a basis for comparison,” Asher said simply.

Jenny swore under her breath in a language Asher didn’t know but could comprehend the tone of, and reached out to squeeze his hand. Bandaid looked like he’d been slapped across the face. Kent’s brow furrowed with mild confusion. Only Wraith looked like he had some kind of understanding, but Asher didn’t think any of them could _really_ understand growing up after the fall, any more than he could understand growing up in a world without the ever-present threat of the infected.

As far as the ritual went, that seemed to be the end of it; they stayed grouped together for a while to eat the fish, which was surprisingly well-flavored. Asher had assumed that catfish would taste muddy, but whatever spices constituted part of the rations here meant that it was decently seasoned,

Kent headed toward what constituted the main part of town, drawn by the lights and laughter of what passed for the local bar. Wraith pitched a hammock between two trees, of all things, and settled into it like a goth moth in his cocoon. Jenny and Rai said their goodnights and went into the rail driver, less interested in the town itself than the implied protection that the town offered from nighttime incursions from the infected.

Bandaid turned toward the rail driver’s steps as well, but Asher caught him by the elbow. “Benjamin,” he said softly. “Come for a walk.”

“I’m getting pretty tired,” Bandaid said, but only as the most token of protests.

“Really? That’s a shame. I guess you’ll still appreciate the guestroom I organized for us, even if all you do is sleep in it.”

Bandaid grabbed his hands; even in the dusklight Asher could see his eyes shining. “You got us a _room_?”

“They have a couple of small rooms where people can stay if they’re visiting from another town. Not that that happens much. I—” But his words were cut off by Bandaid pulling him close into a hard kiss.

“Let’s go,” he said against Asher’s mouth.

“Are you sure you don’t want to just nap in your bunk?”

“Lead the way, _sir_.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a longer story I have been co-writing since April 2018. While I do hope to post more, it's going to depend on what my co-author wants to do. I'm putting this up because I wrote it solo and I'm proud of it. I didn't have access to the game rules at the time to check whether this scenario was feasible; now that I do I'm disinclined to go back and rewrite anything, considering that this entire concept is pure self-indulgence on the part of two writers who were unhappy with some dice.


End file.
